Introducing the SESG Research Data Portal: An Open Tool for Country-Level Sovereign ESG Analysis
Author: Olayeni Olaolu Richard
Year: 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21320383
Portal: https://olayeni.github.io/sesg-dashboard
Source data: https://esgdata.worldbank.org
Abstract
The SESG Research Data Portal is an open, interactive platform for exploring country-level Sovereign Environmental, Social and Governance (SESG) indicators and entropy-weighted composite scores. The portal is designed for researchers, policy analysts, students, and development practitioners interested in cross-country sustainability performance, governance quality, social development, environmental risk, and long-run country trajectories. It allows users to examine overall SESG scores, explore Environmental, Social, and Governance pillar scores, visualize time-series patterns, compare countries, inspect indicator-level data, build custom SESG calculations, and download data for further empirical work.
Background
Sovereign ESG analysis has become increasingly important in development economics, sustainability research, public finance, political economy, and international policy analysis. Unlike firm-level ESG, sovereign ESG focuses on countries. It asks how national economies perform across environmental sustainability, social development, institutional quality, governance, and related dimensions.
The SESG Research Data Portal was developed to make this type of analysis more transparent, reproducible, and accessible. The underlying source panel is structured by country and year, with country_iso3, country name, year, and a wide set of ESG-related indicators covering environmental, social, governance, economic, demographic, and climate-related variables. The raw source panel includes 198 columns, including the country-year identifiers and indicator variables used for the portal’s computations. The accompanying country metadata file provides ISO3 codes, country names, geographic regions, income groups, income-group abbreviations, and climate classifications, which are used for filtering and comparative grouping in the dashboard.
The underlying country-level ESG indicators are acknowledged as data compiled by the Sovereign ESG Data Portal team and made available through the World Bank Sovereign ESG Data Portal. The SESG scores, dashboard, entropy-weighting pipeline, derived outputs, and custom research interface were prepared by Olayeni Olaolu Richard.
What the portal allows researchers to do
The portal supports several types of analysis.
First, researchers can examine overall SESG scores across countries and years. This is useful for broad country comparison, ranking, and regional analysis. Users can identify how countries compare in terms of composite sovereign ESG performance and how scores evolve over time.
Second, the portal separates the composite score into Environmental, Social, and Governance pillars. This is important because two countries with similar overall SESG scores may have very different profiles. One may perform relatively well on governance but poorly on environmental indicators, while another may have stronger social outcomes but weaker institutional indicators.
Third, the portal includes a Time Series Explorer. This allows users to select one country or a panel of countries and visualize SESG trajectories over a chosen time span. For example, a researcher may compare Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa over 1990–2024 and plot their overall SESG scores, Environmental pillar scores, Social pillar scores, or Governance pillar scores. This is particularly useful for empirical researchers interested in policy episodes, reforms, crises, institutional transitions, or development trajectories.
Fourth, the portal includes indicator-level exploration. Users can inspect raw values, normalized scores, metadata, indicator direction, and pillar membership. This is valuable because composite indices should not be treated as black boxes. Researchers can trace how underlying indicators contribute to pillar and overall scores.
Fifth, the portal provides a Custom SESG Builder. This allows users to construct alternative SESG calculations by selecting particular pillars, groups, indicators, and weighting assumptions. This feature is useful for robustness checks and sensitivity analysis. For example, a researcher interested only in environmental sustainability may build a custom index using only emissions, renewable energy, natural capital, and climate-risk indicators. Another researcher may focus on governance and social inclusion by selecting institutional quality, gender, education, and poverty indicators.
Finally, the portal supports data downloads. Users can download official SESG outputs, pillar scores, group scores, normalized indicator data, metadata, entropy weights, and source acknowledgement files. This makes it easier to use the data in statistical software such as R, Stata, Python, MATLAB, or EViews.
Illustrative use case: comparing country trajectories
Suppose a researcher is interested in the evolution of sovereign ESG performance in West Africa. The researcher can open the Time Series Explorer, select Ghana and Nigeria, choose the period 1990–2024, and plot the overall SESG score. The same researcher can then switch the metric to the Governance pillar to examine whether institutional indicators moved differently from social or environmental indicators.
A second step would be to open the Country Explorer for Ghana and inspect the selected profile year. The dashboard displays the overall SESG score, pillar scores, group-level scores, and indicator-level values. The researcher can then change the profile year and observe how the country profile changes over time.
A third step would be to use the Pillar Explorer to compare countries within a selected pillar. For instance, the Governance pillar can be selected for a particular year, and the researcher can compare countries by governance performance. If the research question is environmental sustainability, the same procedure can be repeated for the Environmental pillar.
A fourth step would be to download the filtered data and estimate an empirical model externally. For example, a researcher may combine SESG scores with growth, debt, trade, climate-risk, conflict, or institutional datasets. Because the portal provides country-year outputs, it is suitable for panel-data applications.
Methodological note
The official SESG score is based on a composite-index framework using indicator normalization and entropy weighting. Indicators are first classified by direction: positive indicators are those for which higher values imply better performance, while negative indicators are those for which higher values imply worse performance. Raw indicators are normalized before aggregation. Entropy weights are then used to assign greater weight to indicators with more information content across the country-year panel.
The official dashboard distinguishes between official SESG scores and custom user-generated scores. This distinction is important. Official scores are precomputed, versioned, downloadable, and citable. Custom scores are exploratory and depend on the user’s selected indicators and assumptions. This structure allows the portal to support both reproducible analysis and methodological experimentation.
Data source acknowledgement
The underlying indicator data are based on the Sovereign ESG Data Portal source workbook compiled by the Sovereign ESG Data Portal team. The source brings together indicators currently available through the World Bank Sovereign ESG Data Portal, including ESG framework indicators, supplementary country statistics, and wealth-accounting data. Country metadata include ISO3 codes, geographic regions, income groups, and climate classifications. The source team may be contacted at:
Suggested citation
Olayeni Olaolu Richard. (2026). SESG Country-Level Dataset and Dashboard. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21320383
Conclusion
The SESG Research Data Portal is intended to support transparent, reproducible, and accessible sovereign ESG research. It allows researchers to move from broad country rankings to detailed pillar, group, and indicator-level analysis. It also supports time-series visualization, cross-country comparison, custom index construction, and downloadable data outputs. By combining a public dashboard with citation-ready data and transparent methodology, the portal provides a practical research tool for studying sustainability, development, governance, and country-level ESG performance.
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